5.8.0 and 5.8.8 both return the same result for me. 

is tagged as a unicode string

[download]
This is perl, v5.8.0 built for MSWin32-x86-multi-thread
Binary build 806 provided by ActiveState Corp.
Built 00:45:44 Mar 31 2003

Encode 1.83

[download]
This is perl, v5.8.8 built for MSWin32-x86-multi-thread
Binary build 817 [257965] provided by ActiveState
Built Mar 20 2006 17:54:25

Encode 2.12

[download]

It would make no sense for it not to be tagged. When one asks to decode a string of bytes (UTF8 off) to a string of chars (UTF8 on), it makes no sense that the same call sometimes returns a string of chars and sometimes get a string of bytes.

I'd say the bug is in the docs.

In reply to Re: Behaviour of Encode::decode_utf8 on ASCII by ikegami
in thread Behaviour of Encode::decode_utf8 on ASCII by jbert

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